Yesterday I heard Peter Haas wisely say, “Happiness is a spiritual problem not a circumstantial problem.”

Too often many of us fall into a spiritual funk when our circumstances take a turn for the worst: – Why did God allow my child to get sick? – Why did God allow my business to fail? – Where is God when my pain is so bad? – Where’s God’s love when I’m feeling so alone?

Why does peer pressure cause us so much stress whether it’s in a school lunchroom, a college dorm or a corporate board room?

Why? There are many reasons. Steve Stephens wrote a brief, yet insightful list explaining why friendships are important to us; even those who are just coworkers.

Why Friends Are Important by Dr. Steve Stephens

They laugh with us They cry with us They build memories with us They stand beside us They confront us They believe the best in us They help us grow They keep us from temptation They make our lives better

Subtitled, “Discovering The Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle”, Michael John Cusick begins with an abrupt and compelling question, “What’s Better than Porn?” He spends the majority of the rest of the book answering that question.

“You and I were created to fly. But something has gone terribly wrong…Adam and Eve lost their innocence and…barely a day goes by that I don’t hear a story about a man losing his (innocence) in exchange for pornography…(and) the losses are devastating.”

Shame, researcher Brene Brown explains, “is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection.” That “there [is] something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection.”

Shame tells us we will, and should, be rejected by others.

Brown goes on to explain that the “only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection…we all know that feeling: ‘I’m not blank enough. I’m not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.’ ” 1

Actually that title was just a clever word play. The truth is some limits drain me, other limits free me.

Let me tell you about my drain problem.

Our washing machine drains into a tub in our laundry room. A couple days ago we discovered the sink that the wash machine drained into was stopped up. After we whined, tried to assign blame and avoided the problem we began to conquer our drain problem.

After two days later we finally conquered it. Now our basement looks like this photo.

Overcoming the fear of being exposed is one of the keys to breaking the bondage of the tricks and lies about cutting.

The Fear Of Exposure Perverts Our Thinking

“Psychologist Larry Crabb says that the primary motivation for all of our social behavior is a fear that if others really knew us as we are, they would reject us in disgust. This fear of exposure is rooted in our sense of the ugliness of our fallen natures as they have been perverted and corrupted by sin. Satan delights in inflaming this fear…”